


Come Back, Come To

by yet_intrepid



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, POV Black Lion, POV Outsider, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Shiro Week 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 02:23:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8648113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: Shiro doesn't tell the others what he's dealing with, if he can help it. But the whole mind-melding bit makes hiding things from his lion a little harder. 
(Short fill for Shiro Week, day five: the Black Lion.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Adventures in Solitude" : 
> 
> I know you want to   
> Breathe through   
> Come back, come to,   
> But it's coming at a bad time...

He comes to her hangar, sometimes, in the middle of the night—her new paladin, with his brave shoulders slumped in a way he never lets the others see. She opens the cockpit for him when he asks, and he curls up on her floor.

He is incomprehensibly young, she thinks, every time he comes to her for comfort. Not as young as the others, of course, but compared to her long years? And compared to her previous paladin, even, this one is a child.

A child who has seen too much.

For when they fly together, he shows her parts of his mind that he has sealed away from himself. She could touch them, could ease the fear and the guilt that flood him for reasons he cannot even remember, but the trust between lion and paladin is sacred. She will not tamper with his thoughts, even for his own good, unless he gives his permission. And right now, she is unsure he would even maintain their connection if he knew she could feel his lost memories, each of them, like a rush of wind.

It is the third time, now, that he has visited her this way. He is shaking against her walls, and she tries to adjust the temperature for him, but he sends back such a wave of _no_ that she rescinds it. Still, she knows he’s cold, and she knows, too, that his kind tend to seek softness and warmth for sleep.

She prods at him gently. What is he doing? Why does he want the cold, the metal floor?

He doesn’t answer her exactly—in fact, he tucks his head closer to his chest, like he is hiding—but she feels his response anyway. _Familiar. Normal. What I deserve._

At that, she wants to growl, but she doesn’t, because her paladin will think she is angry at him. She is not; she could not be. She is angry that he has been made to believe this, that someone taught him he belongs curled on cold floors with his arms protecting his head. That no one will defend him, that he is not allowed to be comfortable, vulnerable, safe.

So she doesn’t growl. She hums instead, guiding the inner-workings of her gears into gentle pitches. And slowly, as he falls asleep, his shoulders loosen. His mind slows, too, from its orbits of self-blame, and when she finally turns the temperature up, she can feel his good dreams.

She swirls her own memories around him: the love she felt when he trusted her in the blind nosedive, the joy when he unlocked her hangar for the first time in all those years. He is brave, she tells him; he is brave and he is kind and he is hers, her paladin, and she will hold him like this as many nights as he needs.


End file.
